Is "Jumpscare Horror" a Video Game Genre in its own right yet?

Basically, I've been thinking about games where there's monsters wandering around who jumpscare you if they catch you, and the main gameplay loop is avoiding that.

Obviously, a large bulk of these are just ripoffs/parodies of "Five Nights At Freddies". But I think we might be at the point where we're now getting games in their own right in the category. I was playing Dark Deception and while I'd definitely concede that it was a Five Nights At Freddies Style Game, it also seems strange to say that it's a FNAF clone- it's clearly its own game. Likewise games like Poppy's Playtime which (whatever you might think of its quality as a game or bandwagoness of its premise) doesn't seem to just a FNAF clone. It's deviated into its own thing.

Basically, yeah, seems to me like Jumpscare Horror (for lack of a better term) seems to be its own genre of game beyond just "FNAF clones" at this point. Opinions, disagreements, other examples?

Edited by Urbenmyth on Dec 13th 2022 at 12:51:34 PM

1) Media forums limit topics to being about entire works/studios/channels/etc. to cut down on the number of threads. You can probably ask the question over in Chatterbox: Video Games, though. Unless you want this to be a general thread about this genre of gaming. I think it would be fine in that case? I've seen some "genre" threads here and there.

2) Jumpscare horror is as good a name as any. I've been just calling it Children's Horror myself due to most examples being targeted at younger gamers, but I'm aware that's more a descriptor of target demo rather than content.

As to the question of whether "jumpscare horror" is a genre in its own right, I would say this, I think: genres are constructs; they exist however they're used, and only exist as they're used. Thus my question is this: do many people identify these games as part of a (sub-)genre of their own?

As to the games mentioned, speaking for myself I wouldn't call either of the ones listed derivatives of Five Nights at Freddy's: they lack the resource/camera management or the relatively-static player-positioning of that series, I would say.

Rather, I would say that they have more in common with "stalking monster" games: those in which the player and one or more monsters roam freely. See games like Penumbra or Amnesia: The Dark Descent—both of which predate Five Nights at Freddy's.

(And which have older roots still.)

More in keeping with Five Nights at Freddy's, I would say, might be games like Deathwatch or Observation Duty.

I see the term "jumpscare horror" less as a genre and more an insult towards games perceived to be overly reliant on jumpscares to actually scare people.

Assuming this thread is permittrd to stay, I just asked about this in the FNAF thread. Choo Choo Charles, Project Playtime, Tattled, FNAF the glitched attraction, Dark Deception, and others have made me come to a similar conclusion.

I prefer to call it the "pursuit" genre because stuff like Hello Neighbor, Choo choo Charles, and Haply Few don't necessarily rely on jumpscares.

There definitely seems to be at least a trend—I don't know offhand whether it's yet quite a "genre"—of such "pursuit horror" (I like that label). There are tons of horror games of that sort, especially in the indie space.

And they're not new at all—see older games like Ao Oni, for example. But I do feel like there's an up-tick in them, or at least in their prominence.

Conversely, the trend towards their being in first-person 3D is somewhat new, I think. This, to speculate, perhaps as a result of the greater accessibility of 3D game-creation these days and the influence of P.T.

It's interesting to think that Silent Hills might be the single most influential ("real") video game that was never actually developed.

It was playable as an concept at least,so it was developed just expanded on

I was trying to distinguish it from games like Polybius which are entirely fictional. :P